With the current, rapidly deteriorating state of the Windows operating system, you have to take the small wins you can get: Microsoft is now offering the option of removing “AI” actions from Windows 11’s context menus. buried deep in the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7344 release notes, there’s this nugget:
If there are no available or enabled AI Actions, this section will no longer show in the context menu.
↫ Windows Insider Preview release notes
If you then go to Settings > Apps > Actions and uncheck all the “AI” actions, the entire submenu in Windows 11’s context menus will vanish. While this is great news for those Windows users who don’t want to be bothered by all the “AI” nonsense, I wish Microsoft would just give users a proper way to edit the context menu that doesn’t involve third party hackery. KDE’s Dolphin file manager gives me full control over what does and does not appear in its context menu, and I can’t imagine living without this functionality – there’s so many file-related operations I never use, and having them clutter up the context menu is annoying and just slows me down.
There’s more substantial and important changes in this Insider Preview Build too, most notably the rollout of the Update Orchestration Platform, which should make downloading and installing application updates less cumbersome, but since it’s a new feature, application won’t support it right away. This release also brings the new Windows MIDI Services, and Microsoft hopes this will improve the experience for musicians using MIDI 1.0 or MIDI 2.0 on Windows. There’s a slew of smaller changes, too, of course.
I’m not exactly sure when these new features will make their way to production installations – who does, honestly, with Microsoft’s convoluted release processes – but I hope it’s sooner rather than later.
Dolphin has the wonderful custom actions per MIME type that are shell commands. No Windows file manager has that. Explorer barely works now. This isn’t the biggest of its problems, but it is nice that we can remove it without editing the Registry.
Windows barely works now… Unless you are on nvidia, I don’t know why you’d use Windows for anything (I know, proprietary legacy software…) I mean that by the way – nvidia drivers are still holding back Linux, and that sucks.
I’m a graduate student and my university was an early adopter of Office 365, so that’s what I have on my Windows laptop. As much as I wish the school would fall on the side of open source, I don’t see that happening until a lot of people in the IT department retire. I’m not studying IT, but my aversion to anything “AI” has been successful so far…
My kids had that from school – and my wife had it from work. In both cases, the Windows native build would routinely fail, then the updater would fail. They all got around that failure by just using the web version – which works fine on Linux. In fact, my wife switched completely to mac, and will never look back.
I’ve found it somewhat useful. In a recent group project I was able to easily share a document for us to collaborate on. Although we used Zoom to meet, rather than Teams, we mostly used Web-based Word. I had to open the document in desktop Word once, when Web-based Word struggled with more advanced style changes. Nothing earthshattering, but it was nice that it worked.
One of my teammates had never heard of LibreOffice, or DigiKam, so I hope my explanation of these products inspired her to research them. The other only really knew Google Docs.